Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing?
aftermath.siteThere really isn't anything of substance in this article. Just a low-quality complaint about AI and AI devices with such hot-takes as:
> You will notice that many of these tasks are just interacting with the lazy Silicon Valley dipshit treat ecosystem that already exists.
Honestly I'm hesitant about AI devices as well but dismissing it entirely is very Luddite-like. Will these smart AI devices succeed? Who knows... It's a risk but I can absolutely see areas where these devices will succeed - like bringing tech to the tech illiterate (or even just illiterate).
And Rabbit's price-point puts it in a very competitive position to be the iPhone of AI devices. Worth watching to see how these things continue to develop.
It’s pretty stupid that apparently we need a separate device because Apple watches over our hardware with loving grace. This should be a drop-in Siri replacement, but the only way that will happen is if Apple deigns to buy them, and then I still won’t have choice.
Luddites aren’t anti-tech but pro-worker, so being skeptical of AI is a fine thing to Ludd.
Luddites aren't pro-worker, they're pro-worker's-status-quo. They want workers to be artificially insulated against change at someone else's expense, which is really to the long-term detriment of workers.
The author is a self-deprecating gamer, not a Luddite. He runs a YouTube channel on gaming called "Highight Reel". In reading the review of the presentation I did not detect any predictions about the future success or failure of the "Rabbit R1", except some line about whether he thinks the Apple and Google app stores will accept an app. Instead, he is just asserting that this thing is not for him. He is giving his opinion. IMO, his review is entertaining and refreshing considering the garbage put out by "tech journalists". Making predictions is low brow "content". Like reading horoscopes.
It's enlightened ludditism.
Think of the ophthalmologist who wears glasses but sells you LASIK surgery. (He's skeptical of it due to an intimate understanding of the risks.) And now they're complaining that a type of LASIK surgery is being inflicted on everyone, as all consumer devices shoot beams at your eyes to auto-correct your vision.
This site is a bunch of ex-Gawker, ex-Vox and ex-Vice people submitting articles en masse to places like Reddit and HN. Why would it have anything of substance?
I think it's correct to say it is Luddite like to complain about a worse interface to the pocket computers we all already carry. As the article correctly states - what's the point? Why waste resources building these weird little AI gadgets that could be reduced to an app on all the devices we already have.
I mean, I get it, someone thinks they're going to be the AI iPhone and become the next Apple. What I think they're missing is many people enjoy using their phones to watch cat videos on Tik Tok, and very few people want to use their communicator badge to sell bitcoin.
Have you ever seen anyone struggle to even use an iPhone? I have. These interfaces aren't completely natural enough for everyone to grok. As I stated, I saw a potential use-case with the illiterate - tech or otherwise. I think this is valid reason enough, but not everything has to be some major innovation vs the previous one.
This is a startup and tech community. What's the point of Dropbox when "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"?
Just because there's alternatives doesn't mean this product doesn't have a space in the market.
I think the overemphasis on dumb, natural interfaces actually makes the situation worse. "What's a computer?" We're just reinforcing the idea that computers are these magical things that people couldn't possibly understand. Most people can! They just have learned helplessness about technology.
The value in Dropbox is paying someone else to handle durability and availability for your data. It's very undifferentiated now.
Informed tech discussion needs to scrub "Luddite" from its vocabulary as some kind of "gotcha" criticism. And not only that, serious study of the Luddite movement will actually inform today's conversations as we continue to see the rollout of bogus technologies which are a sign of enshittification & VC hype rather than meaningful progress.
For those of you who argue that a device like this is useless I urge you to visit someone with Parkisons, essential tremors, ALS, rheumatoid arthritis, limb injuries etc as well as very low vision and observe the difficulty they have interacting with the vision + multi-touch interface of their phones.
I expect iPhones to have better accessibility designs, controls, and accessories for these people than this, and most will already have iPhones. It doesn’t help that it looks like it’s marketed primarily for crypto zoomers.
That's the neat thing about phones. You can program them to interact with you via touch and voice(and even camera in apps like Google lens) without having to purchase a new piece of hardware dedicate to accessibility.
A voice app might be ideal for a subset of these groups, but my experience observing others using voice interfaces has not been encouraging. Many people, especially the elderly, are hard of hearing, have an accent that is misunderstood by technology, and/or speak with a incompatible cadence. People also need time to process the response, but with voice it's happening at the device's timeframe, not the user's.
I have a friend who is... slow.
He uses a dedicated GPS device in his car and it speaks directions very slowly. Seems to work for him.
Thanks, I just remembered that there's a setting on my phone to control the speed of speech.
A GPS application seems like a tough place to use it, because it's time critical.
I agree with you that generally people who complain about assistive devices do not consider any form of disability in their analysis. But the way that the consumer tech industry is shaped makes selling assistive devices really hard. Investors only want to invest in things that will be the next iPhone which makes actual assistive tech a really tough industry because the market is too small. So companies broaden try to broaden their reach but in order to do that they sacrifice the resilience, durability, reliability that those under-served communities really need. Most abled people can handle the 80% accuracy of a voice assistant, but for someone who needs an assistive device, that 20% failure rate can be brutal. The bar is so much higher to help those communities, and most companies wont bother.
Basically, if you want to make a medical assistive device, you kind of have to be all in on it, instead of trying to convince everyone that your device is the future of human-computer interaction (because its probably not and you'll just forget and ignore those communities)
Nice, you pulled out the "but think about disabled people" tactic, that's usually a conversation ender. Unfortunately, that's not who they are selling this $1000 device that mimics the existing capabilities of a phone to, based on their marketing.
This device is $199, stop lying.
Were people with disabilities mentioned as a target market?
I often hear on HN how Apple's lockdown of iOS is justified because grandma/grandpa need it that way. The only grandpa I've ever seen featured in an Apple product presentation is Tim Cook.
IPhones have similar voice activated functionality.
And where it doesn’t, an app can add these exact features to devices people already own, since the LLM isn’t running on device on the rabbit (it’s far too small)
Also this product definitely isn’t being positioned as an accessibility device.
Did you miss the part of the article where the complaint is that current voice assistants already do just about everything that was demonstrated? "Play some music. Who performed this song?".
I'll stand by the argument that the device is useless, because it does not appear to bring anything new to the table, "think of the children^Wdisabled" arguments aside.
I dislike and object to the scope of this device as much as the author.
It's not a popular view, but I hope Teenage Engineering is acquired by a very large company soon so that they can be relegated to functioning somewhere as a harmless novelty devision.
This way they will get a big pay day and be treated like a prize, while their influence to create proprietary devices for the landfill is effectively quashed.
> I hope Teenage Engineering is acquired by a very large company soon so that they can be relegated to functioning somewhere as a harmless novelty devision.
I don’t think that’s a common outcome of being “acquired by a very large company”.
Very large companies tend to only run large projects, even if they run them as hobbies. They simply cannot have small divisions.
As a simple example, if BigCo made this thing, they’d want to translate it in a gazillion languages, vet it for not stepping on some country’s or minority’s toes, set up support pages, have their IP lawyers go over it, etc.
Worthy considerations
I’ll let rich people test this thing out for me. Looking forward to all the news, articles, blog posts etc. of people’s experience (good or bad) using this thing. Wish I could get some kind of RSS feed about successes/failures of this thing.
Teenage Engineering does interesting and good work. Similar to Kano, they have very good modern design ideas and they produce actual devices. That's the best thing about this useless evil thing. It exists in the world and can provide inspiration for others to work on.
Another positive-ish thing to say would be is that this device is likely going to increase in value. Not because its popular but because it is going to be rare.
Hope they can inspire someone to make a left-handed version.
I admire your dedication to finding positive things, but if this particular cloud-dependent chunk of plastic appreciates in value I’ll eat my Audrey.
The author seems to be on the fence regarding this device, although there are some subtle clues in there that he may be _leaning_ towards not liking it. They're hard to spot though.
It does beg the question of why it's implemented in hardware though, and not just an app on your phone.
Their Pocket Operators are great although, as the article points out, the rest of their audio products are incredibly expensive for what you get.
The PO are still expensive for the hardware they have and the UX leaves a lot to be desired...
This is giving me flashbacks to Web 2.0. We won’t need web sites anymore! Everything will be an API and we can have our own custom front-ends to all these services!
It sounds great on paper. If I were selling widgets, I might want an API so people have yet another avenue to buy widgets and put money in my pocket. But at that point I’ve lost control of the widget-buying experience and I can’t collect as much data on the audience of widget buyers.
Public APIs disappeared as quickly as they showed up and companies focused on partnerships. You can’t ask your voice assistant to order you a pizza from the local joint, but if you say “I want a Pizza Hut pizza” we’ve got you covered.
I expect this product to go the same way. People will find a way to block their browser automation and the universe of things it can do will shrink until it’s a glorified timer and to-do list. But if you want a medium stuffed crust and a side of wings, we’ve got you covered.
This is an imperfect glance at the future. The apple watch is another: my gf interacts with hers mostly by voice, and uses it instead of her phone for most things.
With the limited bandwidth of voice, your interaction with the phone will be tiktokified: some algos will decide what’s spam, what’s legit, what you should see right now. Unless you can afford a flagship phone, your phone will be as worthless as google search.
I myself have stated I feel bringing tech to the tech illiterate is usually a mistake because those people are largely a security hazard to any large IT enterprise. Teaching dumbasses to use tech is how exactly how even a DECADE after The iloveu bug emailing malware to huge corporations members and spear phishing them with chained malware was how most companies got hit because its next to impossible to teach John over there in marketing not to at least ask his fellow workers if they really sent that email before downloading every attachment and executing it as well as every Excel spreadsheet that demanded you enable macros and enabling them. For OVER A DECADE, phishing emails with chained malware were how companies got hit because the tech illiterates refused to learn.
Like, when you let the morons in, they become a Security Hazard.
But if this device, can keep tech illiterates, from using and interfacing with the tech we need to secure, All the better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8s9uzPIqQ4
Yuki did nothing wrong.
I'm actually pretty interested in the hardware and form factor, and absolutely un-interested in the corpo backend services.
I wonder if it's possible to homebrew this odd little square.
I bet. Small Pi enclosure with a mic, battery, wifi, speaker, and a basic OpenAI API client and you’re golden. It’s a matter of time.
My question is what happens when you veer off the happy path for a given task? Like if your hotel cancels, or thinks you didn't pay and you did? Seems like disasters waiting to happen.
I wouldn't even trust that it had booked the hotel on the correct date, or with my breakfast or room preferences. I'd need to go double check everything it did anyway, so what's the point.
AI can do anything (eventually) but it will never take responsibility for it. Irresponsible like a genie in the lamp.
To be fair - I work with humans who I feel the same way about. We will be able to use these devices when we've seen they work over and over. Trust is only ever earned.
The accuracy problems will eventually be solved. The point is to remove you from the decision making process of spending your money and delegate that to the institutions who want your money. Sure, the itinerary looks good, but since you haven't actually planned it yourself you don't know what the tradeoffs are. This is the end-goal of capitalism, extract the most value from people and resources as possible, and launder all of the anti-competitive and scam-adjacent behaviors through "the algorithm!" Just like how the police launder racist policies through statistics and terrible facial recognition or predictive policing software.
> I resent AI. Not AI itself–that’s just code, despite what tech guys with flashlights under their chins tell you.
What this based guy doesn't realize is that recognizing that complex neural networks are "conscious" is precisely the way to stop companies from abusing them for everything.
Also, is it just code? Can you show me the code that lets an LLM reason in the way it does? You'd have just as much luck pointing to the neurons that let a human do that. If it WAS just code, it'd be GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned AI) -- a literal algorithm. That's code. And that'd be better since it would be something we could understand and troubleshoot, not a magic black box of brute forced insane computing power that megacorps and nation states can monopolize.
I don't think this thing is any more evil than a hammer. It's a tool. If it's not useful to you, don't use it. If it's not useful to anyone, it will quickly cease to exist. I don't think it's going to do anything to erode the concept of morality. I don't have to trust it with my money any more I would trust anyone else about my money.
This kind of take, which is common with AI, always assumes this odd state of blind trust. As if I can't read and reason about the output like I would anything (or anyone) else's output. Are there people I trust more than AI? of course. Do I trust AI more than some people? also true. Would I blindly trust a person or AI without doing some of my own reasoning at some point in the process? no.
It seems to me the author of this article is going to have a tough time in the coming brave new world. I do love the writing style and wit though and Im even inclined to agree. Still, AI-ALL-THE-THINGS is coming. Imagine a Siri/Alexa that actually DOES STUFF.
I seem to recall similar statements about EFTs, crypto, Web3, Metaverse, Second Life, and many others.
Some of this will probably shake out to be real long term but a lot less than people think right now.
I suspect we all will have a tough time as I read about Duolingo layoffs while pivoting to AI, Amazon flooded with shitty AI books, autonomous drones, predictions of animators having three years left on the job market and so on. I can’t wait to unload on my AI therapist.
I try not to be negative online, but did enjoy the Something Awful-esque hyperbolic acidity.
> in the coming brave new world
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about how all this stuff works out, tbh. I'm kind of assuming it'll be like the last three AI bubbles (that time in the late 90s when voice was going to be your primary interface to Windows vNext, the self-driving car/CV hype early last decade, and the brief chatbot mania of 2016 that was killed off with extreme prejudice by Microsoft Tay); much sound and fury, but probably rather limited lasting effects once the dust settles.
Like, it seems rather unlikely to me that that main way people book holidays in a decade will be by talking to a machine and having it select hotels and 'cool SUVs' (trick question, no such thing) for them. If nothing else, it is unclear how this would be meaningfully different from just choosing the first hotel from Expedia/whatever matching the search filter.
Actually doing stuff wrong is a whole lot worse than doing nothing at all. False positives for work that actually matters are not acceptable. In the world of move fast and break stuff style innovation like this device seems to be especially at this price point is bound to be disappointing.
For me to trust this it would need some kind of Lockheed Martin style engineering and 4 decades of development with mathematical proofs that it works and can't not work.
But in the end the device would cost $50,000 and be 35 years out of date.
Is AI going to make the important decisions like who the person should vote for and actually cast that vote too? Seems like a risk when the next generation will grow up outsourcing most of their decisions to AI and then need to figure out how to make the important ones on a reduced experience base. Definitely need to be brave for what is likely to come.
"Is AI going to make the important decisions like who the person should vote for and actually cast that vote too?" - Funny you mention that use case - I know for a fact that its being worked on right now (at least the "who to vote for" portion). The younger generation has allowed TikTok to talk them into seeing how many laundry pods they can eat ... so yeah things are going to get increasingly stupid most likely.
To your point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power
I'm sorry but this has been going on since the very first time people were allowed to vote on something. AI is not making this new. The new generation is not the _one_ being influenced (it's everyone).
Everyone everywhere is being fed nonsense from all sides (I mean metaphorically not politically), all the time. AI is making it cheaper, but it's not making it more possible.
I'm not so aligned with this article. I think this product shows a great deal of vision and creative risk. Even if it ends up as a failed experiment, I think it's still a worthwhile effort, and I'll be happy to see where they go with it.
The market will decide. If nobody likes it then it will flop. If it takes off, then well done to them.
Good to see some form of innovation. Maybe they will create a new category of device, as dozens of Chinese imitators come up with clones? Either way this is all positive.
A device like this with the battery capacity and processing power for running local AI would be very good for privacy.
I could see some people buying it, if someone advertised it as totally private, with no logs or sensitive data stored on even the device itself (i.e. in RAM and gone on power off). So you can ask it anything, it will answer, and there is no trace at all once it's switched off.
The idea is fine, but the inevitable outcome here is that Apple and Google do the same thing in their respective smartphones and this device (if it's even good at all) is obviated.
It's a funding/VC grab. I'll look forward to the "Our incredible journey" post a couple of years from now.
I would be astounded, astonished, and amazed if Apple doesn't have Siri++ in development to do exactly this, but with more guardrails.
Good. It’s disappointing how bad Siri is. I don’t need it to be an LLM trained to know everything in the encyclopedia galactica… I just need Siri to understand basic sentence structure so i don’t have to reword something five times before giving up because i don’t know the magic word order.
> What the people at rabbit are pitching is a device that logs into all your services like Uber and Expedia and then lets you interface with them all at once through an LLM and agents called "rabbits," by way of a little device that does not contain those actual apps.
So when A.I. gets hacked, it can start shit-posting on all your accounts? Sounds as useful as lastpass...
So far with every TE product that showed up here it was pretty obvious what its purpose was. Until now. What does this do? :-)
> (Takes picture of the contents of his fridge.) This is what I have in the fridge, can you make me a nice dish that’s low in calories? (It then pulls up a recipe without citing its source.)
That sounds like... something that would make my life slightly better, in a non-essential but desirable way.
Can my phone do this already? When will it be able to do it?
Without a "large recipe model" to be able to vet these recipes that it's likely generating, I'd be worried about the accuracy and palatability of generated recipes.
There are websites that have databases of recipes you can sort by ingredient, which is a much better approach to this problem.
Yes. Take a picture with ChatGPT and ask it the same question.
LLMs are, generally, _not good_ at making up recipes. Like, very not good.
I don't even think it's properly monetizable, it needs a lot of juice in the backend.
That's what I don't get here that worries me. It feels either like a ticking time-bomb to deprecation, and/or a privacy nightmare if they're somehow selling data they mine from their users.
It'd be neat if the software was opensource and you could point this device at your own LLM, then at least you'd have some assurance it won't be e-waste if the company shuts down.
But I don't see a world where you can feasibly support the required infra of providing LLMs for your users with only hardware sales as a revenue stream. Their website specifically calls out that there is no subscription fee, so either they'll introduce one later or something else will need to be the other source of revenue.
It doesn't seem to do anything smartphone voice assistants couldn't soon do - i.e. it provides a voice interface to apps that currently require touchscreen.
Examples: ordering an uber, playing a song on spotify, ordering a pizza.
Does it only operate by speaking to it? I don't want to talk to my fisher price calculator in public.
As others have suggested, this is novel, and ML in everything will be coming to products soon, but this isn't it.
a "cool SUV"... Sorry I can't do that Dave. (Besides, to an American who doesn't live in NYC or WDC, it feels like a lot more of a vacation to ride the train.)
Yeah nothing of substance here. I will say that theres nothing with Rabbit that I see impresses me that I can't already do with Google voice assistant.
I'm not even here for the "AI creation" horseshit. I just want a better general assistant that's smarter than Siri that can handle task-keeping, calendaring, and reminders better.
And I like that it's "push to talk". It listens on my command, not on the whims of a voice query in mid-air.
I'll give this a crack because I'm part of the weird population that likes "stand-alone" appliances for things. It's got a certain charm to it that the workflow just would work better for me and my brain that an app alone just can't touch.
If the "Rabbit OS" cloud service could be self-hosted, then I'd be all for it.
I use push to talk on the action button on iPhone on the rare occasions I try to make Siri do something for me. I refuse to say 'Hey Siri' like a twit.
Why the action button? You know the power/lock button does that, right?
It's another "asshole in the middle" device, trying to get in the middle/on-top-layer of all the other things people have put between people and their lives...
Okay…then don’t buy it. Have a nice day
Cool viral advertising, bro.
Cynical pessimism is easy and lame - it doesn’t make you sound smart, I like to see people try new things.
Every new thing has these sorts of articles written about it, they’re best to just ignore.
Why hate? Just don’t buy. The author is a child. Just more ragebait as usual.
I do love how people complain about clickbait yet ragebait appears in the front page regularly. There you go - that’s why clickbait is a thing. Techies are not immune
Why hate? Just don't read.
Obviously people will sometimes express their opinions on societal trends and products, especially in their blogs.
I don’t hate the article, actually. It’s a good summary on the device if you’re unfamiliar.
Hahahah, you beat me to it. +1
Why hate? Just don't read.